The Gift and the Curse of a Great Chef

  As a diner when you enter a restaurant, the minimal expectation is to eat food that reaches your sense of value.
But for the chef it means everything....

Every item that comes out of the kitchen is an extention of the chef. It is a combination of his vision, his hard work, dedication, 16 hour shifts, his time away from his family, everything that makes the chef what he envisions himself to be pours out like a cornucopia onto the plate.

The food for the diner is the chef's summation of who he sees himself.

So what the diner doesn't see is this pursuit of perfection that is transferred around the kitchen, an energy that is unspoken yet blanketed around everyone involved from the dishwasher to the sous chef. For the chef this vision of perfection is seen, but never felt, except for brief moments before it slips through their fingers like water in a cupped hand.

It is the true essence of madness....pursuing something knowing that in your heart it is truly impossible to achieve.....and yet it still is your motivating factor.

So what the diner experiences at best is a taste, a taste of their sense of perfection, but for the chef buried in the kitchen he will never know perfection was achieve. But they will attempt to reach it on the very next plate.

This is the gift and the curse of a great chef......

Obstacles....

To pursue my dream of becoming my chef I had to go part time at my job so I could attend school full time. I figured after budgeting I could deal with the pay cut, I just had to be wise about managing my expenses.

But then "it" happened.

After the first week of school my car died, or more accurate, my clutch died. A major expenditure that I hadn't budgeted for, nor did I now have the money for.  And to make matters worse I didn't have a back up plan.

On certain days I was fortunate enough to be able to drop off my girlfriend and borrow her vehicle when her schedule permitted, and somedays my brother would pick me up from school and take me to work. But most days I would have to use public transportation.

Due to the way the public transportation system is structured where I live I had to walk a half a mile, take two buses and two trains to cover the 18 mile distance to my school. My commute had been changed from a 20 minute drive to a two and a half hour journey one way. I was taking morning classes so I could still work at my job in the evening. I had to make work enough hours to repair my car.

Everyday felt like an internal battle between my desire to succeed and the temptation to just quit. I was trying to keep up with my studies but the wear and tear of my long days was catching up to me.

I use to ride the train and think of the movie The Pursuit of Happiness, I felt like I had to be tested to determine how bad I wanted this, for me to figure out how bad did I really want to become a Chef?

My answer.....really bad!

I began to look at the struggle as part of my voyage, and I passed my first test. Due to some fundraising, and literally asking anybody I knew to "donate" no matter how small the amount, I was able to raise enough money to repair my car. And even though I received my first and last "B" in one of my classes, missing in "A" by only ten points, I knew in my heart that for the rotation of classes I had excelled in conquered my obstacles.